Paytm to invest Rs 10,000 crore into banking and financial services business

Paytm today said it will invest Rs 10,000 crore over the next three years to ramp up its banking and financial services business.

Paytm has been working on bringing in a payments bank, it lloks like the Noida based company will soon offer payments bank services in the country, it claims to have already pumped in over Rs 3,200 crore in the last two years for its operations. "We will invest Rs 10,000 crore in our banking and financial services in the next three years. We hope to get the final approval for our payments bank operations soon, so that we can roll out services," Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said at the event where the Alibaba backed company launched a new feature on its app which enables its users to buy and sell gold on its platform.

At present, Paytm operates a mobile wallet and e¬commerce marketplace. With over 1.5 billion transactions on its platform, the company now aims to cross the 4.5 billion mark this year. Payments banks can accept deposits from individuals and small businesses of up to Rs 1 lakh per account. To deepen financial inclusion in the country, RBI had allowed small finance banks and payments banks to start services. Telecom operator Airtel was the first company to go live with payments bank in the country. Currently, Airtel and India Post Payments Bank are the only two players that have commenced payments bank operations.

At the end of March 2017, Paytm had 218 million mobile wallet users. Paytm has also hugely benefited from the government demonetization in November last year. "We have seen significant growth and this year too, we expect to see a manifold growth to 4.5 billion. A significant part of this growth is coming from tier II and beyond cities," Sharma said. He added that cities like Jaipur, Sonipat, Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam and Durgapur were among the fastest growing for the company.